American Gods Gets Official April Premiere Date & New Poster

While Pushing Daisies and Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller is no longer serving as the showrunner on CBS’ upcoming Star Trek: Discovery TV series (as was originally the plan), the celebrated TV writer/producer still has a new TV show premiering this spring. Fuller is currently concentrating his efforts on finishing American Gods, the small screen adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s best-selling fantasy novel of the same name. Fuller is serving as co-showrunner on the series alongside Michael Green (Heroes), while Gaiman himself is lending a helping hand as both an executive producer and a contributing writer on the American Gods TV adaptation.

American Gods stars The 100‘s Ricky Whittle as Shadow Moon, an ex-con who is left feeling adrift in life upon being released from prison, shortly after being informed that his wife Laura (Emily Browning) has died. Shadow is then approached by a mysterious fellow who calls himself Mr. Wednesday (John Wick: Chapter Two‘s Ian McShane) and recruited on a mission: to travel across the United States and reunite the “Old Gods” that were brought to the country from around the world (such as Orlando Jones’ Mr. Nancy, aka. Anansi), in order to lead a battle against such “New Gods” as money, celebrity and Media (Gillian Anderson). Now we know when this “war” officially begins on the small screen, too.

Starz has officially announced an April 30th, 2017 premiere date for American Gods, about a month and a half after the TV series’ first episode (as directed by Hannibal alum David Slade) premieres at the 2017 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. The American Gods screening at SXSW takes place on March 11th and will feature Fuller and Green in attendance, accompanied by several key members of the show’s cast (Whittle, Browning, McShane and Jones among them). As part of the premiere date announcement, Starz also released the following American Gods poster artwork:

The promise inherent in Gaiman’s source material (itself, a thematically-rich work of magical realism) being adapted for the small screen by the same writer/producer responsible for the darkly atmospheric and often nightmarishly gorgeous Hannibal TV series, has long kept fans of either the original American Gods novel and/or Gaiman’s literature in general excited to see the end result here; well before a premiere date or even the TV show’s trailer was unveiled. Gaiman’s creative involvement with the project, some years after his efforts to get an American Gods TV series off the ground at HBO proved fruitless, coupled with the show’s talented and eclectic cast, offers all the more reason to be encouraged about the final product here.

American Gods is also the first of several Gaiman adaptations that have been announced and/or begun development over the past year, to make it out of the gate. Gaiman himself is serving as the showrunner on Amazon’s Good Omens miniseries (which is due out in 2018), based on the novel that Gaiman cowrote with the late Terry Pratchett. In addition, Hedwig and the Angry Inch co-creator John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of Gaiman’s short story, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, is expected to hit theaters sometime later this year. It’s a good time in general to be a Gaiman fanatic, in other words.